UCLA Center for the Study of Women

What has been called the “affective turn” at this year’s MLA reflects a growing interest in questions of emotion and affect in humanities research. My own work makes use of theories of emotion and affect to think about modern and contemporary poetry, and my feminist approach to this research has led me to seek out theories of affect that account for gender, or to critique or reformulate theories that don’t. I will give a brief account of what I have found in this area of theoretical research, and demonstrate how I think it can add dimension to political analysis through a look at the gendering of emotion in the recent election.